Pieter Abbeel has been working towards household robots for quite a while; given his involvement and several of his students at OpenAI it's not surprising they'd be thinking along similar lines. The issues you mention are real, but current hardware is already capable of useful tasks if we had software to control it properly. For example, here's a demo of a tele-operated PR2 performing household chores: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2GAz5F03Ls#t=60s